Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash
I was working with a client who had originally come to study with me years ago to help her with her singing. She recently returned to lessons, this time to manage a diagnosis of bursitis in her hip joint. No longer working in music, she was now in the world of Not-For-Profits and business. She’d had PT, and was taking Pilates, and something her Pilates instructor said reminded her that Alexander would be a good tool in her toolbox for self-care and healing.
We picked up almost right where we had left off. Her nervous system still remembered our work in the Alexander Technique, and within minutes of the start of our first lessons, she was pain-free while sitting, which has been one of the challenging activities she had been dealing with for 4 months before reaching out for lessons.
In our last lesson, about 7 lessons since she returned, she was her usual, delightful self. I was surprised when she told me “I really only smile like this when I am at my Pilates sessions or here with you at my Alexander lessons. I sort of feel guilty that I am taking time away from my business .”
“Really? “ I asked.
“Oh, yes, my colleagues and co-workers would be surprised to see me smiling so much. I’m not like this at work.”
“I never thought about it, but by it’s very nature, shouldn’t self-care be pleasurable?”
She paused, and took that idea on board.
What a thought: something that is good for you can be enjoyable?
I shared this obvious, but not so obvious, perspective with my students all week. “This is one of the healthiest professions in the world: I get a great lessons every time I give a lesson.”
One of my students broke out in laughter during his lesson, when I told him this. “I do better when I teach, and your lesson is better when I practice what I preach: ease, calm, poise, and efficient effort in my own system while I put hands on you to help you find an easier way of being in your own system.”
Not all helping professionals get benefits for themselves when they see clients. Massage therapists are often fatigued and find their work physically challenging. Their work can put then at risk for injury because they have to work so hard.
One of my teacher-trainers who was a founding member of The American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT), Debby Caplan,, worked as a physical therapist in the 50’s, helping amputees and injured veterans recover from wartime.
In some cases, they had undergone amputations and needed to relearn the activities of daily living. Debby was tiny, about the same height as me, 5’2”, and she said that her daily work was physically demanding, including helping patients transfer from bed to chair to walking. Debby said she managed the demands of her work by coordinating her own movement and activities with Alexander Technique concepts and principles, and she left the hospital each day with more energy, less sore and strained than many of her much larger co-workers in the field.
Debby had been trained to teach Alexander Technique in her late teens by her mother, Alma Frank (who had been trained by and graduated from F. M. Alexander’s teacher certification in England).
So, next time you are in the process of doing something that is supposed to be good for you, and you are enjoying the process, or experiencing greater ease and relief, consider that this happy-product of self-care may be a clue that it’s working! Not everything that is good for you has to be unpleasant…